I was fortunate enough to able to complete an internship abroad during my undergraduate career. Though I was extremely excited to begin work at a German university in Berlin, I was also very apprehensive about the huge transition I would have to make. Not only was I living in a new country speaking a relatively uncomfortable language, but it was also my first laboratory experience in the side of materials science, which so often overlaps with chemistry. Through my time in Berlin, I learned about German culture, conducting science abroad, and I got a healthy dose of chemistry.

Luisa Russell during her internship.

My lab work in Germany involved the synthesis and functionalization of gold nanospheres and nanorods for the ultimate goal of the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis using hyperbranched polyglycerol. Though I worked under an older graduate student and had to start essentially from the beginning due to my relative lack of chemistry lab training, my fellow interns and I were given many opportunities to expand on our laboratory skills, and I came to be independent in both synthesis and in data collection and analysis for a variety of nanoparticles. Though we mainly worked with gold, we also explored more nontraditional nanomaterials including graphene and nanodiamonds through work my mentor was doing in collaboration with other groups, giving me a broad experience in nanotechnology.

In addition, doing my internship abroad rather than at another university in the United States gave me a new perspective on science as an international endeavor. Though lab books, conversation, and notes were in German, everything with a larger audience was conducted in English, from guest lecturers to group meeting presentations to papers written for publication in journals. While this made me a little more comfortable given my barely conversational German, it also struck me how my peers were obligated to be conversant in English to be part of the international science community, as well as a contributing part of their own local groups. This helped me understand the unique challenges faced by international scientists, and I look forward to continuing work with international collaborators in the future.

My internship, though it started out slow, ended up being an invaluable experience for my current work. It was a great way to get an in depth and low commitment experience with an aspect of lab work in materials science that I hadn’t previously been familiar with, and inspired me to continue working in this field. My work in the Searson Group centers around nanoparticle synthesis as applied to quantum dots, and my experience both as a member of a chemistry lab and as a semi-independent synthesizer of nanoparticles gave me an advantage in learning to navigate my way around the lab and the relatively difficult protocols applied in the synthesis of quantum dots. While it did break up the span of time over which I could do longer term research, ultimately the opportunity to explore a variety of aspects of materials science in a hands-on way was extremely valuable, and helped to inform my future research interests.

Luisa Russell is a second-year PhD candidate in the materials science department working on hybrid multifunctional nanoparticles in Peter Searson’s research group.

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